With Come Back playwright, author and “drag queen extraordinaire” Sky Gilbert rounds off what may be thought of as a trilogy of novels concerned with literary celebrity, only this time with an SF twist. After An English Gentleman (which dealt with J.M. Barrie) and Brother Dumb (J.D. Salinger) we now get a 138-year-old Judy Garland coming to us from the mid-21st Century, where she is writing a thesis at the University of Toronto on a semi-famous gay Canadian playwright named Dash King.

King and Garland are obviously alter egos for Gilbert himself as well as for each other. What they share is a sense of being out of step with their time. For King, our contemporary, this primarily means being a gay writer and aspiring academic in an age that is post-gay and post-theory (the two are linked). For Garland it means being an archaic and decaying physical presence in a post-gender, post-body, post-reality world.

Any account of the future is an allegory of the present, and the parallel between King and Garland only brings this into sharper focus. If King is, as Garland puts it, “a metaphor for the decline of an entire era,” it is one that she extends even further. The world of 2050 may be dominated by a Modern Ottoman Empire and under Sharia law, but none of that really matters because everyone is living in an apolitical virtual world of their own anyway. It is this enervated, post-everything withdrawal from life that King, Garland, and Gilbert rage against in a crackling psychosexual satire that sounds an alarm about the way we live now.

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

(Knopf, $31.00, hardcover, 481 pages, March 27 2012)

For those fond of genre labels, Angelmaker fits loosely into that sub-category of SF known as steampunk. Though mainly set in present-day England, this is an alternate-history, “shadow Britain” of architectural and social undergrounds, secret societies and a host of arcane technologies that reek of Victoriana. Our hero Joe Spork is himself a holdover from this earlier, proto-industrial world of artisanal craftsmanship: he’s a retiring clock repairman who is drawn into a vast global conspiracy involving a deathless super-villain, an elderly (but still lethal) secret agent, and a whimsical doomsday device that is activated by a swarm of mechanical bees. It’s all very bizarre, but then nobody does eccentricity quite like the Brits.

Nick Harkaway (obligatory trivia: he’s the son of author John le Carré) is one of the hottest new names in SF, with a style resembling Neal Stephenson at the top of his game. Also reminiscent of Stephenson is the intellectual breadth, ribald erotic escapades, and unflagging narrative energy. The result is pure reading pleasure and one of this year’s must-reads.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

(Orbit, $28.99, hardcover, 576 pages, May 22 2012)

SF writers aren’t prophets, and they tend to dislike it when their imaginings are read as forecasts of things to come. That said, some of them do take care to construct plausible futures that are interesting projections of current trends. The epic space operas of Kim Stanley Robinson fall into this category, imaginatively blending “hard” SF technology with a personal, left-leaning take on today’s pressing political, economic and environmental issues.

Brief interchapters bring us up to speed with what has been happening in the past 300 years. Global warming has melted most of the ice caps, turning Manhattan into a Venice of skyscrapers. The population of the Earth has hit 11 billion, but luckily the human race has colonized the rest of the solar system. “Spacers” can even take asteriods terraformed into taxicabs shuttling between Mercury and the moons of Jupiter. And yet people still visit art galleries to view original Tintorettos, read Proust and whistle Beethoven to themselves!

The main story, which has an odd couple trying to save the Earth from itself while at the same time trying to deal with a conspiracy involving renegade “qubes” (quantum computers), is well padded with scenery and talk, with only a couple of dramatic high points. But most readers will still find a lot to enjoy in Robinson’s often fascinating as well as hopeful look ahead.

Alex Good edits Canadian Notes & Queries.

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